Parents of PDAers: Mental health & wellbeing

Thank you so much for having me.

It's an absolute honour.

Oh, that's great.

So I know we've spoken in the past and you talked about that your child's reached sort of crisis point at six years old.

So can you take us back to that time and tell us what life was really like for you as a parent then?

Yeah, of course.

I think at that time I was just incredibly overwhelmed.

It was very early in our journey and we didn't fully understand what we were seeing, I would say.

We knew that our child was autistic by this point.

We were pursuing a PDA diagnosis.

I'd read The Explosive Child by Dr. Russ Green, which was amazing, really helpful for us.

So we had started to adapt our parenting.

We had a fantastic OT that we were working with, and that was starting to help us understand our child's world.

I think back then, what it was, it was the gap between knowing the theory and understanding actually living it day to day.

I was still at the time trying to get them into school.

You know, there's this huge social pressure.

Your child should go to school.

And I wasn't entirely grasping the impact that that was having on their mental health.

I didn't really understand about emotionally based school avoidance back then.

I'd heard a few terms being thrown around back then.

It was still called school refusal.

quite negative so my child reached a crisis point which I won't go into the details because obviously that's private for them but at such a young age to fear that your child no longer wants to be here pushing school attendants to have that that effect on them, that has a profound effect on you.

That changes everything.

And I really, I felt like I was failing no matter what I did.

I had so much love in me, but I was just drowning in the practicalities in the day to day.